WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – The Springfield Falcons had four comebacks in them Sunday afternoon, but they couldn’t muster a fifth.

Brett Sterling scored the game-winning goal with 1:11 left to lead the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins to a 5-4 victory in northeastern Pennsylvania, sending the Falcons to just their second loss in their last eight games.

“We were hanging around,” coach Rob Riley said. “They were outplaying us pretty good, but when you get to the last couple minutes, you’re looking at a point at the worst. So it’s a disappointing result.”

Defenseman Nick Holden led the way for the Falcons, scoring twice as the team erased four one-goal deficits in the first two and a half periods.

“The thing with our streak here lately is we’ve had a lot of different guys scoring,” Riley said. “It hasn’t just been (Trevor) Smith and (Kyle) Wilson, who kind of carried us for a while there. When you have other guys scoring, those are the days you kind of have to take advantage of it, especially when you get four goals on these guys. You gotta get some points, but it snuck away.”

The Falcons had plenty of factors working against them before the puck even dropped Sunday.

First, they were wrapping up a stretch of five games in six days with a 3 p.m. faceoff after a 230-mile overnight bus ride.

Second, the game was sandwiched in between a huge home win over Portland on Saturday night and two games with Connecticut, a rival for the third-and-final guaranteed playoff spot in the Atlantic Division, on Wednesday and Saturday.

And oh yeah, they were facing Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, the team with the best record in the AHL.

But every time the Penguins threw a punch, the Falcons countered.

After Penguins center Zach Sill slammed home a rebound in the first minute of the game, Holden scored on a wrister through a Ben Guite screen to make it 1-1 six minutes later.

Guite erased a 2-1 deficit midway through the second period when he picked a puck out of a net-front scramble and scored.

Later in the second, after Tim Wallace scored short-handed to give the Penguins a 3-2 lead at 14:04, Springfield defenseman Brent Regner scored on a shot from the blue line through traffic at 17:06 to tie the score again.

Finally, after Sterling scored on a breakaway early in the third period to give the Penguins another lead, Holden threw a puck to the net from the left-wing corner and it deflected in off goalie Brad Thiessen to tie the score 4-4 with 9:01 to go.

All four Springfield goals came with bodies at the front of the net.

“They did a good job of getting traffic,” Penguins coach John Hynes said. “They have a lot of big forwards and their D does a good job of getting pucks to the net. We haven’t seen as much of that, with forwards that size being around the net quite that much.”

Sterling’s game winner came when he picked the puck up off the end boards, fought out toward the right faceoff dot, turned and fired a shot past goalie Gustaf Wesslau.

With the loss, the Falcons slipped a point behind Worcester for the third playoff spot in the Atlantic. They finished a brutal, five-game week with a 3-2 record.

“If you had said that before the year, we would have taken it,” Riley said. “But it’s just tough to kind of let a point slip by here.”